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“il bel sesso, e l'austero Senato“: The Coronation of Dogaressa Morosina Morosini Grimani*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Bronwen Wilson
Bronwen Wilson*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
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Abstract

The Venetian printmaker Giacomo Franco produced several engravings for the 1597 coronation of Morosina Morosini, the wife of doge Marin Grimani (1595-1605). Focusing on three of these prints in which a bird's-eye view of the city is framed with illustrations of the festivities, this essay explores relations between space, gender, allegory and costume as they were manifested in this rare female procession. An examination of the pictorial conventions used by Franco and other artists to depict the event suggests that Morosina's coronation functioned both to resist existing codes of gender but also to reassert female patrician status.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 73 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1999

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Footnotes

*

Tide quote from Bistort, 34.1 have benefited enormously from responses to aspects of this paper at several conferences: the University of Manchester in 1997 and the previous year at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, the Renaissance Conference of Southern California, the meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in a session organized by George Gorse, the University of British Columbia, and a cross-disciplinary symposium organized by Michael Stone-Richards at Northwestern University. Whitney Davis, George Gorse, Debra Pincus, Martha Pollak, Nina Rowe, Juergen Schulz, and Larry Silver read earlier versions of this paper, and I am grateful for their numerous suggestions. I am particularly indebted to Stanley Chojnacki and Dennis Romano for their trenchant and insightful criticisms. Finally, my special thanks to Ed Muir for his numerous ideas, tremendous assistance, and persistent enthusiasm.

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